I can’t remember where the concept was first bruited about – someone else’s blog, probably one of the radical non-ranting centrists like the Belmont Club, Neo-Neocon, James Lileks, or Classical Values. To be honest I have as much of a bad memory for where I read about something or other as I do a dislike for crazy rants, name-calling, straw-man construction and other social ruderies. I’d prefer to hang out, on line and in the real world with thoughtful, fairly logical people, people who can defend their opinion with a carefully constructed arguments and real-life examples and/or references. In short, I’d prefer the company of people who don’t go ape-s**t when another person’s opinion or take on some great matter differs from their own. Well-adjusted grownups, in other words – who are comfortable with the existence of contrary opinion – and do not feel the need to go all wild-eyed, and start flinging the epithets like a howler-monkey flinging poo.

So it’s not like I ever went out there looking for insane levels of contention in venues like the Daily Kos, or the Huffington Post, or conversely, Michelle Malkin, or Kim du Toit. That kind of partisan-ship on both sides … well, it just wasn’t me, I’m not particularly confrontational, I have a real life, and many other interests besides politics, and the Tea Party. I also write a lot, I do a non-political blog at Open Salon, and at TheDeeping, market my books, manage some websites and work for the Watercress Press … and all sorts of other stuff, some of it among people who do not share very much of my political opinions, such as they are. Which, inter alia, according to the last couple of surveys I participated in, put me in as tending toward towards the libertarian: strict constitutionalist, fiscal conservative, guardedly social liberal – look, I haven’t cared for decades what consenting adults do in private, just don’t be doing it in the road and frightening the horses. And you kids – get off my lawn! As regards foreign policy, I’m an unreconstructed Jacksonian, mostly because I’ve read enough history to be fairly clear-eyed about the power of national leaders, city-states and mass-movements of people over the long haul of history. What they are capable of doing, they eventually will do – as the Melians discovered of the Athenians. I believe more in the unspoken power of the community to enforce standards of behavior and decorum, rather than written ordinance, I believe in keeping things simple and uncomplicated. I believe that the United States is a pretty radical construct, almost unique among nations as a Republic, that the Founding Fathers put together an amazing document, and one which ought not to be amended or revised for petty reasons and partisan advantage. I also thought Sara Palin was a good choice for V-P, and that she was a pretty straight-up politician, and the citizens of Alaska had shown pretty good sense in electing her for a governor.

And for these opinions, over the last five months, I have been called a liar, a racist and the next thing to a Nazi, either directly on Open Salon, and Facebook, or indirectly in comments there and elsewhere. It’s getting just a bit wearisome, guarding what I write, biting my tongue, and considering what I may say and to whom, lest what I say set off some horrible diatribe from someone I have heretofore considered at least a friend, in person or on-line. Really, I don’t go looking for knock-down, drag-out confrontations, and if people want to believe three impossible things before breakfast, it’s no skin off mine, as I am pretty sure that it would be a waste of breath using logic to talk people out of a belief that logic never put them into. I had just expected better from the people I had chosen to hang around with, in the real world and on-line.

It’s also getting a bit frightening, seeing all this anger indiscriminately being unleashed among people who weren’t particularly confrontational all along, and to realize how terribly polarized a lot of places and spaces are becoming, fractured along red-state, blue-state lines, along statist and constitutionalist lines, and between people who bitched about government busy-bodies poking their noses into everything and the people who bitched about how there ought to be a law. Historically, it puts me in mind of the period just before the Civil War, when feelings about abolition and secession ran so very hot and high that ordinary citizens on either side of the issues could hardly have a conversation about it, each assuming the worst of the other. And then there came a point when there was no more talking – and it ripped our country apart for five bloody years, and set sullen resentments on the Southern side which simmered for a hundred years and more.

When I first came across the “cold civil war” phrase, all these months ago, I thought it sounded like an exaggeration, like the start of some inter-blog flame war, which would engage the participants as passionately as the North and the South, and amuse (or appall) the rest of us for a couple of weeks. But over and over again, the free-floating anger keeps breaking out in the real world. Early this spring, I repeated a joke to another lady in my Red Hat circle, but we were in a restaurant – and I looked around quickly, to see who was within earshot, and lowered my voice so that no one beyond our table could hear. This was a small thing, maybe even a little stupid – but a cold civil war is made up of small and stupid things. Having an old co-blogger call you a racist, being reluctant to put a bumper-sticker on your car, knowing that friends who still work for the DOD are keeping their heads down and their mouths closed, for fear of repercussions on the job, and being very, very careful in casual conversations … no, not an exaggeration any more. Just a cold, cold civil war reality.

(Regular Commenter Al, from across the pond, had this to say – sorry got caught up in the spam-torrent:

My response is: Well, if your source is the BBC, no wonder you are a bit perplexed about all this… and it’s not about the war, Al. Everything is NOT ABOUT THE WAR!”